I Believe John Kerry

Note: The writer of this column wishes to acknowledge her debt to the late journalist Michael Kelly, whose 1998 essay, “I Believe,” served as her template. Anyone desiring to read the original, which the author highly recommends, will find it archived here, copyright The Washington Post Company, February 4, 1998.

I believe the senator. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he supported the war in Iraq, and I believe him now when he says he was really opposed to it all along. I believed him when he said he would take care of our troops regardless, and I believe him now when he says he was only showing them just how much he cares by voting to cut off their funding when the going got rough. I believed him when he said he was caught in the crossfire in Cambodia in 1968 and I believe him now, when he reportedly admits he wasn't.

I believed the senator when he said every last detail of that blue Cambodian Christmas was “seared” into his brain, and I believe him now when he says he’s not quite sure if his recollection of that blessed event is solid. And I most certainly believed him when he testified before the transparently non-partisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, swearing America made him commit horrific but strategically needful acts, like hunting down cattle and dogs for sport. I believe the senator and his fellow Vietnam Veterans Against the War were motivated by nothing but patriotism and love for their vile country.

I believe the senator’s totally unsolicited television appearance on the Dick Cavett show in April 1971 was in truth doctored, even then, by the radical right-wing Carlyle cabal, operating in concert with the Saudi royal family, the CIA, and the reactionary conservative media conglomerate, News Corp. I believe in a secret, subterranean, centralized corporate authority.

I believe in the Kerry standard of adherence to the First Amendment, enunciated by the senator in his formal complaint to the FCC accusing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign of illegally conspiring to discredit him--a standard which holds that censorship is okay so long as it acts to suppress speech in instances where there exists "overwhelming evidence [of] coordination with the Bush campaign." I note with appreciation the senator’s use of the word “overwhelming.” I believe the senator when he says there is no evidence of any similar coordination between his own campaign and MoveOn.org.

I believe the senator when he says Bush’s attorney, Benjamin Ginsberg, is clearly in bed with special interests, and I believe him when he says his own lawyer, Joe Sandler, clearly is not. I believe counselors like Ginsberg who represent campaigns, parties, and soft groups simultaneously are all acting illegally, even though the law and the FEC declare they aren’t. I agree with the senator that all lawyers working in conjunction with the Bush reelection team and the SBVT are automatically suspect, and I agree with him, too, that counselors representing the DNC and their sludge funds are by default not even remotely fishy.

I believe the senator has the right to criticize his country, just as I believe VVAW had the right to criticize it, too. And I believe the senator now has the right to force John O’Neill to abrogate his right to criticize the senator, just as I believe the SBVT should be forced to abrogate its right to criticize the senator, too. I believe those sixty-some-odd veterans who signed affidavits are all lying, just as I believe the senator and his massive army of eight are the only ones telling the truth.

I believe the senator is being sincere when he lauds Michael Moore, whom he thinks should never be censored, and I believe he’s being sincere, too, when he denounces Paul Galanti, whom he thinks must be. I believe the senator is being sincere when he condemns as illicit the $17 million in 527 and 501 soft money the Bush campaign has raised thus far, and I believe he’s being sincere when he condones the $186 million his own campaign has to date accumulated by these same unquestionably above-board means.

I believe the senator when he says he favors a strong national defense, and I believe he was in fact actively strengthening our nation’s defenses throughout the 1990s by systematically hacking military and intelligence budgets to bits, and by voting to slay every single major weapons system that ever dared lumber across the Senate floor.

I see nothing suspicious in the report that the senator was awarded the Purple Heart for sustaining mortal scratches etched by whizzing bullets on December 2, 1968, even though he wrote in his journal a full nine days later, on December 11, that he and his crew in the Viet Cong had not yet “been shot at.” I believe the Purple Heart was similarly bestowed upon every rice-paddy warrior, who, like John Forbes Kerry, suffered self-inflicted, practically lethal nicks, cuts, and bruises, and I believe, too, that the Bronze Star and other medals of valor are routinely granted for knee scrapes.

I believe the terror threat was first invented and then exaggerated by the Cheney administration in order to build a pipeline in Afghanistan and seize Iraq’s vast oil reserves on behalf of Hallow-burton. I believe George W. Bush is personally responsible for every single plight the world has known since 9/11 and for every single individual grievance, too. I believe Michael Moore, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Paul Krugman, Jim Hightower, Jeff Rense and Janet Jackson are all part of a vast left-wing anti-conspiracy truth squad called Bush-Busters. Especially Janet Jackson.

Hello, all. Thanks for the good words.

Yep, you wouldn't believe the number of folks who've written to ask me how I could possibly be so dumb as to believe anything John Kerry says! LOL!

Anyway, here's an elegiac tribute I wrote to Mike Kelly after he was killed in Iraq on April 3, 2003. His wife and mother both wrote to thank me.

April 10, 2003

I Believe: In Remembrance of Michael Kelly Karen Pittman

I am no one. I have nothing whatsoever to do with wars, with cataclysms, with apocalypse. I have never tread on desert soil, never traveled with the1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, never witnessed the massive American army rumbling. I have never watched an old man fall to his misshapen end. Yet the passing of Michael Kelly profoundly moves me.

In his last column posted from Iraq on April 3, 2003, the same day he was killed in a Humvee accident, the syndicated Washington Post columnist, editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, and veteran correspondent of two Gulf Wars contemplated the jarring anonymity of death. Having come upon the “twisted” carcass of an “old man,” an Iraqi irregular, he clashed head-on with the meaninglessness of life in the dead dustbowl that is the desert. The corpse, with “his blood-matted gray hair . . . was lying on his back,” near the rapidly charring hull of one of Saddam Hussein’s many makeshift tanks, a truck’s “burning skeleton.”

Clearly, smoke wasn’t the only thing getting in Michael Kelly’s eyes . . . and the chalky odor that I imagine must have calcified his nostrils would in the end turn out to be just the ordinary, dry, nihilistic stink of death—not only the obvious death of the sad, sacked straggler he noted, but his own top secret one, lying in wait to ambush him just around the bend. I find his preternatural lingering over that lone soldier’s blood-smeared remains poignantly prescient. Not long after filing this terminal report, Kelly literally took a wrong turn—and wound up similarly undone in a Baghdad canal.

His journalistic reputation he sealed when things were livelier, way back in 1998, in a more cynical yet complacent time—a time when the national psyche was obsessed with nothing more urgent than an incumbent president’s sex drive (which was “urgent”—and obsessive—in the extreme) and whether or not the wild stock-market acceleration of the nineties would ultimately shape up to be a prickly “bubble” blown in a collective pique of “irrational exuberance.” Indeed, this was an era when Money only was Holy—and when, according to the administration’s (anything-but-) divine materialistic scheme, a secular trinity emerged, whereby Alan Greenspan was the all-knowing God; Bill Clinton a secondary, unfairly-crucified, admittedly flawed Christ-figure; and Ken Starr the oft-blasphemed Paraclete of Conscience.

Into this swollen blasmosphere (blasphemous atmosphere) Michael Kelly injected his ironic wit and savage moral grace. With one tiny but hugely influential column called “I Believe,” Kelly showed us the absurdity of the Clintonian creed. This he achieved by cleverly taking the president at his (literal) word. He wrote, in a plain-spoken style (which, oddly enough, anticipated George W. Bush’s) drenching with sarcasm, “I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadn’t had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.”

In “I Believe,” Michael rehabilitated us with his simple but powerful gospel, impossible to refute. “I believe the president has lived up to his promise to preside over the most ethical administration in American history. . . . I believe that The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.”

Kelly’s writing hand was double-jointed; depending on the mood and the occasion, he could flex it in one of two opposing directions, by doing either the artful tango of poetry or the Funky Chicken of straight-talk. He could shuck-and-jive with the best of them. Despite his elastic intelligence, however, he never allowed the curve of his polemic to arch too far over our heads. Even when straining for lyrical effect, he deliberately kept his rhetoric within reach. The same man who tartly and ironically labeled Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky “cheap tramp[s]” also told us of the Spartan aesthetic of war. Listen to the loveliness of this line, one of his last: “The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees [one of which—again ironically—would transport Michael Kelly to his death] and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the American army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.” It has a clean, spare, existential beauty.

Michael Kelly understood the army would march on without him, much as the Iraqi army marched on without that ragtag old soldier. He understood, too, that for as long as human history is writ, wars and rumors of wars will rumble on, pushing past antediluvian warriors upended in the desert, past the primed young reporters paused to gawk at them, and past marvelous Humvees absurdly drowned. War knows an inhuman, piston-like propulsion all its own.

In an April 5 tribute to his cut-down colleague, The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle beautifully mourned the character of the man whose written voice made us shiver: “In a professional universe too often peopled by shark-minded careerists with too many credentials and too little humanity, he was in many ways a kind of throwback to his father's generation of Irish-Catholic blue-collar newspapering. He delighted in journalism not for any illusion of status, but for the joy of language, the adventure of experiences and the chance to prod people into thinking.”

Amen, Ken. Thank God for Michael Kelly. Because of him, and others like him, ours is a less disillusioned, narcissistic age. I, like Michael Kelly—like Ken Ringle, like the countless people proselytized by Kelly’s pure prose—believe.

I believe in the man in the trenches, in the reporter who scraps for the story. I believe in the truthful journalist who believes in the truth. I believe in the foot soldier who believes in his cause, who toils in truth's trenches, and who is willing to die for what he believes. I believe in Michael Kelly.

Though I am no one, I offer my small, faraway sorrow. I offer my gratitude. I offer my prayers for all who have fallen—for those whose shimmering bylines we have known, like Michael Kelly’s . . . and for those whose names will go untold, who have silently died, in a world made loud with grief.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and published poet whose work also appears on Wednesdays at www.amsiriano.com and www.amgoodnews.com, and weekly at www.therant.us. She has also written commentary for The Washington Dispatch and The Common Conservative. Several of her editorials have been recognized by Townhall and added to its archives. Her article "Goodbye, Natalie: Dixie Chick Eats Crow" won Opinion Editorial's Best of 2003 Award, and further earned the distinction of being the most popular (most widely-read) op-ed in the web site's history. Frequently ranking among the weekly Quill Pen Ten, her rants typically generate considerable attention and no small amount of controversy. Her style is as acerbic as it is witty. Occasionally resplendent, often raucous, always refreshing, her no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-is commentary not only informs -- it entertains. She's the Lay's Potato Chip of political punditry: You can't read just one!

tpittman7@comcast.net

FYI: Anyone interested will find my entire archive at OpEds.com: http://www.opinioneditorials.com/writer.php?id=kpittman.

Thanks, all!

Karen Pittman khp0129

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